True Crime Tuesdays – A Fearsome Fiction Podcast Feature: The Strange Death of Rey Rivera

On the evening of May 16, 2006, aspiring screenwriter Rey Rivera received a brief phone call, said “oh,” and ran out of his Baltimore home. He was 32 years old, newly married, and by every account a happy man on the verge of the life he’d always wanted. Eight days later, his body was found inside a locked, abandoned conference room at the historic Belvedere Hotel — beneath a hole in the ceiling that should have been impossible to make from above.

The physics didn’t add up. The injuries didn’t match. The detective assigned to the case said the scene looked staged and was pulled off it three weeks later. And taped to the back of Rey’s computer at home was a note — typed in tiny font, folded into a strange shape, addressed to “brothers and sisters” — that opened with a Masonic phrase, referenced volcanoes and secret societies and Stanley Kubrick, and was never satisfactorily explained by anyone.

This week on True Crime Tuesdays, we go to Baltimore, to a fourteen-story hotel, and to one of the genuinely strangest unsolved deaths of the past twenty years. No resolution. No clean answers. Just a hole in a roof, a note that reads like a riddle, and a case the medical examiner still considers open.